MEDICINAL PLANTS in Folk Tradition

(Darren Dugan) #1

Asplenium trichomanes Linnaeus
maidenhair spleenwort
temperate zones, tropical mountains
Long and widely promoted by learned authors,Asplenium trichomanes must
be regarded as doubtfully an age-old member of the folk medicine repertory.
Its principal use, for severe coughs and chest complaints, certainly goes back
at least to the seventeenth century in certain of the Inner Hebrides,^57 but a
lack of evidence to justify its Gaelic name oflus na seilg^58 suggests that pre-
scribing it for that supposed malfunctioning of the spleen was a borrowing
from the herbals or learned medicine, while use of it in Cumbria as a hair
tonic^59 may be late and idiosyncratic.
In Ireland a cough cure known as ‘maidenhair’ once popular among
country people in Londonderry^60 was presumably this, as also an ingredient
under that name boiled with honeysuckle and oatmeal into a concoction
taken for dysentery in Cavan.^61


Asplenium ruta-muraria Linnaeus
wall-rue
Eurasia, eastern North America
Like Asplenium trichomanes,and for the same reason, the membership ofA.
ruta-muraria in the folk tradition is problematical. Moreover, a plant so wide-
spread could be expected to have left more evidence of its use had it been
much prized, yet only a solitary record has been traced for Britain and that
not a certain one: a plant abundant on walls in Skye and believed to be this
from the verbal description was held to be effective there in drawing the ‘fire’
from the skin in cases of erysipelas.^62
In Ireland it has been identified as a ‘herb of the seven gifts’, valued in
Tipperary for its ability to cure seven diseases,^63 and possibly it was also the
‘wall fern’ employed in Kilkenny for kidney trouble.^64 That it was boiled in
milk and taken for epilepsy in Cavan,^65 however, is seemingly more certain.


WOODSIACEAE


Athyrium filix-femina (Linnaeus) Roth
lady-fern
northern temperate zone, southern Asian mountains, tropical America
(Identification dubious) ‘Female fern’, a remedy for burns and scalds in Wick-
low,^66 has been taken to be Athyrium filix-femina,^67 but the propensity of folk
taxonomy for he-and-she herb pairs lacking in any modern scientific ratio-
nale renders such an assumption unsafe.


62 Asplenium trichomanes

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